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Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Until a couple of years ago, Tig Notaro was a moderately successful
comedienne surviving on a regime of stand-up shows, TV spots, Film cameos and
her touring podcast Professor Blastoff.And then during March of 2012, everything
completely changed.

Whilst filming In a World… she started to feel ill and eventually got diagnosed
with a rare bacterial infection illness known as C DIFF; then as she was
recovering from that she found out her mother had fallen and unexpectedly died;
and then to top it all off, she was suddenly diagnosed with an aggressive
breast cancer… so after so much bad news she made the only sensible
decision:She would fight fire, with
funny.On the night of 4th
August 2012 she decided to tell her story on stage, for laughs, and instantly
make comedy history…

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

If you got a Facebook message from
someone that looked like you saying that they wanted to meet, what would you
do?

Samantha
Futerman is an aspiring
actress living in Los Angeles enjoying some success in her career having just
starred in 21 & Over, Law & Order and Memoirs of a Geisha.She
knew that she was adopted over from South Korea at birth, but was happily
living with her two brothers and parents and trying to break into
Hollywood.Then one day she got a
message from her doppelganger asking her where she was born…

Anaïs
Bordier lives in London
studying textiles at Central Saint Martins, having grown up in France.One day a friend shows her a comedy skit
YouTube video of an American girl that looks a lot like her, so she decides to
send her a message…

Although this sounds like the set up for
a very twee Parent Trap-style rip
off, it is actually a very sweet documentary directed by the American half of
Korean twins separated at birth.After
finding out about each other, they spend the first couple of weeks Skyping and
texting each other (with a barrage of emojis) and then decide to take a DNA
test.Sam then catches a flight to
London for an emotional meeting, during which they find out that they are
indeed long-lost, identical sisters…

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Would you rather an apocalypse to be
quick and terrifying or gradual and tense?I always think the latter is more depressing and love it when filmmakers
agree…

Hernan (Pablo Seijo), a nonspecific office worker in Cordoba, overhears
reports on the radio of civil unrest in Buenos Aries so calmly resigns his job,
cancels his phone bill, donates his cat to a cattery and catches a bus out of
town.Also on the bus are a group of
other unremarkable workers who watch a promo video about their new life at some
kind of retreat.But this is no holiday;
every day the guests are woken up with a tannoy announcing the day’s
activities: Botany, State & Politics, camouflage, explosives…

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Arianna (Ondina Quadri) is a pensive and shy nineteen-year-old studying
Chinese and living with her parents in Rome.She decides to accompany them on a trip to Tuscany to stay in their old
holiday home, which has recently become available after being rented for most
of her life, but when they decide that they want to leave early she stays on on
her own to study and spend time with her cousin Celeste (Blu Yoshimi).

Arianna has not developed through
puberty yet and has still not had her first menstrual cycle, so she quickly
becomes fascinated in her developing and sexually awakened cousin.She also, under guidance of her father (Massimo Popolizio) a doctor, uses
hormone replacement patches and visits one of his gynecologist friends.However, after spending an awkward night with
one of Celeste’s male friends, she decides that she wants to change doctors and
learn more about her past…

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

“So are you going to use this picture and try to
bomb the Americans…?”

Frame
by Frame is about the
modern history of Afghanistan told through the eyes of four passionate
photographers, Najibullah Musafer, a
photography lecturer at Kabul university;
Wakil Kohsar, a photojournalist and democrat; and then husband and wife
photojournalists Farzana Wahidy,who covers women’s stories, and Massoud Hossaini who won the 2012
Breaking News Photography Pulitzer Prize (Here is
his Talk at a Kabul TED event).

The film begins by explaining the rise
of the Taliban after the soviet invasion of 1979, and how they banned
photography for the next twenty years until the US invasion in 2001, leading to
the beginning of a new era of press freedoms (and harsh internal
terrorism).We then follow Wakil as he
explores the upcoming elections and voter registration, Farzana documenting the
heinous violence inflicted on women under the Taliban era and Massoud covering
various events for the newsdesk where he works.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Between 1995 and 2006, Iranian director Jafar Panahi was winning some of the
most respected prizes on the European film calendar: the Golden
Lion in Venice, the Silver
Bear at Berlin and even the Caméra d’Or
at Cannes.But due to his (supposedly)
controversial narratives and ongoing defiance against his home country, he was
arrested in 2010 and banned from filmmaking or leaving Iran.His films eventually had to be smuggled out
of the country on USB keys hidden in cakes…

Friday, October 9, 2015

David
Datuna is so excited to
create his art that gets up at 4am in order to get to his studio.And his enthusiasm is extremely infectious.

Like hundreds of thousands of others,
Datuna escaped the USSR during the cold war for ‘cultural and artistic
freedom’.He grew up in totalitarian
Georgia, where any appearance of difference was discouraged violently (his
father got arrested 7 times for listening to Elvis…), and ended up in
hyper-liberal downtown New York. He now makes vibrant pop art sculptures of
flags (Jasper Johns 2.0), and collage-portraits.

Monday, October 5, 2015

In the
summer of 1999, as the World Wide Web was promising all kinds of technological
miracles, a new type of televisual media company launched called the Digital Entertainment Network.It was an online video archive aimed at
teenage boys with a host of original web shows aimed specifically at targeting
niche audiences, including extreme sports fans, young Christians and young gay
and bisexual viewers.The company was
proclaiming itself to be a radical and innovative new medium for speaking to
young kids, and yet in only a few months the whole experiment was to implode
under a series of extremely dark allegations about the behavior of its
founders…

Saturday, October 3, 2015

“More than
700 million women alive today
were married before their 18th birthday

250 million before age 15…”

Selvi was just 14 when she was forced to
marry a much older and physically abusive husband in her home of South India.Living with him for her teenage years was
such unspeakable torture that she eventually considered throwing herself under
a bus to end the ordeal.But instead she
chose to get on the bus and run away to a girl’s shelter called Odanadi.Four years later she had learned to drive, started her own company and
become South India’s first taxi driver.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Jack (Sam Donnelly) has returned to London after a few years away to hook
up with old criminal connections and make some quick money.After learning that they have all ‘gone
straight’ he meets the enigmatic Laura (Amie
Burns Walker) who knows of a diamond dealer called Duke with a safe full of
£300,000 cash (Robert Goodman).

The criminal lovebirds hatch a plan to
rob the old man, but not before he manages to find Jack’s houseboat and send a
pair of goons round for an amazing Sergio Leone inspired silent stare-down. It
then becomes a classic cat-and-mouse between rival criminals, but told across a
twisting, time-shifting narrative…

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

If there was one dominant contentious
geopolitical phenomenon that has dominated headlines in 2015, it is that of
international borders.Donald Trump is
obsessed with Mexicans in the USA; David Cameron et al are obsessed with Syrians
in Europe; Colombians are fleeing Venezuela; North Korea is goading the South
again; and Israel’s encroaching of Palestine is ongoing.

The news media is abundant with
‘experts’ explaining the ‘facts’ and social media is abundant with opinions and
anecdotes that have gone viral, yet much rarer are conversations with people
who actually live on the border and how this physical division affects them
psychically.Documentarians Stephanie Barbey and Luc Peter have decided to focus on this
underreported group, the citizens who live ‘on-the-edge’ between Mexico and
Arizona.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

When Paul (Alex Humes) is fired from his tedious office job and upsets his
anxious girlfriend Kate (Heidi Agerholm
Balle), he decides to take up running to get fit and pass the time whilst
looking for new work.Sceptical that he
is going to take his new hobby seriously, Kate insists that he spends time with
obnoxious city-boy blowhard Adrian (Valmike
Rampersad).

Exhausted by Adrian’s arrogance and
avarice, Paul is more intrigued by mysterious runner John (Mark Arnold) that he keeps bumping in to (quite literally).John has a dislike of office workers and the
Adrians of the city, and begins to change the way Paul sees himself and his
desire for employment and acceptance by his friends…

On the bank of the Yakoun River in Haida
Gwaii, British Columbia, used to stand a unique tree known by the locals as The
Golden Spruce.It had an intriguing
genetic mutation that let to its needles to look golden amongst the other green
trees surrounding it, which led to generations of indigenous Haida people who
lived on the islands giving it a mythic significance and naming it Kiid K’iyaas.

On 20th January 1997, a
disillusioned former ‘forest technician’ called Grant Hadwin took some final
selfies in front of the sacred tree and then expertly felled it.The focus point of his anger was the
seemingly arbitrary protection of the Golden Spruce tree amongst the rest of
the doomed rainforest, and the motive behind his ecoterrorism was to draw
attention to the ecological injustice and gain support for the protection of the
whole forest.Needless to say, his
actions didn’t go down well with the locals…

Monday, September 28, 2015

In the autumn of 1995, a Danish
dissident called Niels Holck was concocting
an audacious plan to try and help rebel factions in West Bengal fight the
oppressive Communist Party of India.With the help of Peter Bleach,
an ex British Intelligence Officer turned ‘defense trader’, Niels wanted to use
a light aircraft to parachute drop an assortment of AK47s and other military
weapons in to the region to arm the insurgents. (soundfamiliar?)

Unbeknownst to Niels however, Peter was
in communication with the UK government, whom had told him that during a
layover in India, the government would arrest the plane and he would get the
credit for stopping an international terrorist.What could possibly go wrong…?

Bullfighting.Even the word itself is provocative.Yet unlike its analogous animal bloodsports,
such as cockbaiting or Monkey Knife Fights, in its country of origin Spain,
Bullfighting is still a prestigious and noble cultural entertainment.

Modern day Matador Antonia Barrera is obsessed with Bullfighting.He has dedicated his whole life to spending
time in the bullring, trying to win adulation from the crowds and working his way
up to the prestige stadiums of Madrid.From a teenager practicing on the streets, to a young adult gaining
notoriety in Mexico, Barrera knew that he wanted to be in the ring.He’s the kind of guy who says, with a deadly
straight-face, things like “I’ve never had a relationship, even with a woman,
as intimate as the one with the bull.”This is his life.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

When Oliver (Simon Haycock) brings James (Hugo
Bolton) to his family’s holiday villa in the South of France, his hopes for
a secluded romantic trip are thwarted by the addition of James’ friend Caroline
(Elly Condron).Recently splitting up from her own boyfriend,
Caroline begins to turn her attention to Oliver and the dynamic of the holiday
begins to change…

At its core, Wasp is about the importance of glances and non-verbal
communication over dialogue.The
increasingly strained connection between James and Oliver, and the bourgeoning
allegiance between Oliver and Caroline, mostly begins with eye contact (or lack
of it).This intention is probably why
the dialogue of the film is less refined than the visuals.Why do indie LGBT films always have to have a
scene where characters analyse what it means
to be gay…?Yet as the film (and I
imagine, the shoot) moves on, the dialogue becomes more natural and confident.

In between scenes, the camera constantly
returns to close-ups of wasps.At first
an apparent metaphor for Caroline’s unexpected presence in the couples’
holiday, but quickly they seem to highlight a general unease and irritation in
the house – a house that is becoming increasingly more oppressive.Especially the ice-cold pool…

Whereas Oliver has a confidence and
seriousness about him and is more at fault for the tension in the house, it is
James who the camera lingers on for longest as he begins to doubt his two
friends.And it is James’ whose emerges
as the most interesting performance.

Yet ultimately, it is undeniably the
actions and sexual desires of the woman that disrupt the narrative, which is a
welcome role-reversal, even for a gay love story.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Antonia (Rebecca Calder) is a wry and restrained investment banker who
enjoys the luxuries that her career provides her, and Max (Jack Gordon) is a self-assured aspiring East London actor.They are getting to know each playing teasing
psychological games with one another and deconstructing the act of ‘dating’
over the course of a few successful evenings.As they begin to reveal themselves, they each disclose secrets and
insecurities that bring them closer together but ultimately lead to commit
shocking acts of revenge…

Writer/Director Martin Stitt manages to create a pair of engaging characters with
realistic dialogue, and then direct the actors to bring the script to life with
beautifully comfortable and naturalistic performances. The way in which Max embodies the deafening
monotony of unemployment, and how Max and Antonia recreate the cloudy
irrationality of a couples argument are both uncomfortably authentic.As the narrative moves towards its troubling
conclusion, both of the characters elicit sympathy and disdain from the
audience in equal parts – the sign of a successful an engaging drama.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Malcolm (Matthew Jure) is an East-End property developer who lost everything
after the financial crisis of 2008.He
is left with only one dingy terrace house that is in dire need of renovation,
yet the shock of losing so much has crippled his enthusiasm and left him with a
debilitating housebound agoraphobia and appetite for heavy drinking.His only friend Sonny (Richard Pepple) is growing increasingly frustrated with his
inactivity, and adds to Malcolm’s anxiety by demanding the repayment of a
substantial loan.And just as the
situation couldn’t get more stressful, his eventual attempt at home
improvements lead to a dark discovery in the very structure of the building…

Saturday, June 6, 2015

In 2005, two African-American kids from
Brooklyn called Malcolm Brickhouse
and Jared Dawkins met at a birthday
party and developed a friendship over their shared interest in heavy metal music,
discovered through WWE wrestling intros.After teaching their pre-school friend Alec Atkins to play bass (from scratch), they formed a band called Unlocking The Truth and started to play
gigs in Time Square – one of which ended up going viral online:

The (supposed) novelty of charismatic
pre-teen, inner-city black youths playing heavy metal music with emerging competency was
too good to be true for some and they were immediately hunted down by Alan Sacks, the record executive who
brought the world The Jonas Brothers.Within 18 months they become the youngest
artists ever to sign a $1.8million dollar record deal with Sony.Breaking
A Monster is the inside story of their transformation from an amateur band
of kids, to a lucrative and sanitized pop/metal product.

The story of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana is
well known to anyone lucky enough to be born on or before 1990 – he is arguably
one of the few musicians to change the direction of popular music’s aesthetic
during his lifetime (I’ll let you have fun figuring out who else might qualify)
– yet it never hurts to re-familiarise yourself with a truly compelling story.

Cobain:
Montage of Heck (great
film; questionable title) is the story of the life of Kurt from birth to death,
told through interviews with friends and family alongside a litter of images
and enhanced animations from Kurt's prolific journals, as well as original
cartoons synced with recordings of him messing around with his home cassette
recorder and other audio including, of course, amazing live performances.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

You are what you eat.That is the simple message from Stephanie Soechting’s new documentary
about the food we produce / consume and the correlation with the ‘global
obesity epidemic’ that we have been hearing for the last few decades.Fed Up
explores two parallel ideas: that the amount of sugar we ingest is more
important than the levels of fat or calories (or even exercise); and that
multinational food companies and corporate lobbyists have spent decades feeding
us misinformation about how to live healthy lives and exploiting our ignorance
for vast profits.

The film divides itself between the
emotional personal journeys of a number of obese youngsters trying to lose
weight, and more factual sections of historical and political analysis of the
processed food industry and how it has gained such dominance in American
culture. At certain points, watching Fed
Up is worse than sitting through a horror film.Horror films work by confronting characters
with symbolic external threats (vampire; disaster; psychotic killers etc.), which
make audiences empathise and reflect on their own axietites.Fed Up
makes you reflect about the long-term internal threat that audiences are doing
to their own bodies by eating such dangerous levels of sugar.The sugar in my tea suddenly felt obscene and
frightening….

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Disclaimer alert: I have only recently become
interested in football. Even worse, I'm one of those people who only cares
about the World Cup and bugs my friends with recently learned opinions and
shallow analysis. I also (like most casual sports fans) prefer an underdog over
a dominating talented team - and there is no bigger underdog than the American
Samoa football team...

At the beginning of Next Goal Wins, the tiny pacific
island of American Samoa have never won a official football match and are bottom
of the FIFA ranking list. They also suffered the worst defeat in football
history in 2001 by losing 31-0 to Australia. Yet, they are determined to prove
themselves on the world stage, and with the help of despairing Dutch coach
Thomas Rongen (the only applicant) they are training for gruelling
qualifications to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Yet as a American Samoan
official states early on 'When no-one thinks you're good. That's what
makes you dangerous...'

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

“You run
because you’re followed,If you’re followed then you’re
arrested,If you’re arrested then you’re already
guilty…”

After being declared a war hero in the
Battle of Berlin, Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy)
lives a comfortable bourgeois life in the elite of the Stalin-era Soviet secret
police hunting traitors and forcing confessions from them.One of the most recent ‘traitors’ Anatoly
Brodsky (Jason Clarke) is tortured
into giving Major Kuzmin (Vincent
Cassell) a number of names, one of which is Demidov’s wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) whom he then has to
investigate in order to prove his loyalty.

Meanwhile Demidov has become distracted
by the deaths of young boys, including the son of his close colleague Alexei
Andreyev (Fares Fares) to whom he has
to deliver the official death report which claims that he died in a train
accident, even though he appears to have been found naked with strange surgical
scars on his body…

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

In 1842, Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) and Peter (Mikael
Persbrandt) are Danish immigrant soldier brothers who have come to America
in search of a new life.Yet when Jon’s
wife and child come to join them from Europe they are confronted with a
shocking act of hostility from the brother of the sadistic renegade officer Delarue
(Jeffrey Morgan Dean) who leads a
violent posse in tormenting a local town led by cowardly mayor Keane (Jonathan Pryce).The violence and revenge then escalates
between Jon and Delarue, quickly drawing the townsfolk to believe that the best
action is to abandon the town and head further West…

After John Wick (Keanu Reeves) loses his wife to a terminal illness, he receives a
package that has been sent in the event of her death that contains her final
wish: that he transfers his love for her to a small puppy and to carry on his
life.This symbolic gesture gives him a
coping strategy for his mourning, yet is taken away from him when a gang of
Russian thugs (led by Iosef – Alfie
Allen) breaks into his house and leave him and his new best friend for
dead.

When Iosef’s gang boss father Viggo (Michael Nyqvist) finds out about his son’s
reckless actions he has to inform him that John used to be an associate of his...
that was an expert in ruthlessly killing people.Whilst John prepares to get his revenge on the
family, he checks in to The Coliseum – a kind of safe space hotel for criminals
that operates by a strict formal code where favours are rewarded with bespoke
gold coins:Gold coins that can also be
used to hire assassins or a dead body removal service...

Monday, April 20, 2015

Exactly five years ago today, an
offshore oil-drilling rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of
Mexico killing 11 people and leading to the biggest oil spill in human history
– 76 million gallons over 87 days.Although claiming responsibility almost immediately (how could they not)
the oil giant BP are still depriving
claimants out of compensation money and the industry has still not learned the
lessons from such a devastating disaster.

The
Great Invisible begins
with the individual stories of the tragic loss of life on the day itself and
how it affected the families of the deceased.Told through moving interviews and ominous home videos, the families and
survivors explain how the conditions on the rigs were exhausting and that
cost-cutting measures resulted in instant income bonuses, regardless of
safety.Then the documentary leads into
how the environmental catastrophe affected the livelihood of thousands of
fishing towns along the South Coast of Texas, Louisiana and Alabama, and how
whole communities have been devastated due to the polluting of the sea life and
the mismanaged response from the Oil giants as well as the federal governments.

Monday, April 13, 2015

To save themselves from the threat of
eviction from an ethereal post-financial collapse Detroit, single-mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) and her son Bones
(Iain de Caestecker) must both
resort to extreme measures in order to find money to protect themselves.Billy reluctantly takes a job in a macabre
horror/burlesque club where performers enact elaborate self-harm performance
pieces under the stewardship of sinister and lecherous Dave (Ben Mendelsohn). Meanwhile Bones and
his friend Rat (Saoirse Ronan) get
hunted by the local bully – imaginatively named ‘Bully’ (Matt Smith) – whilst trying to repeal a curse put on the town
connected to a abandoned town flooded after an artificial river was created.
(Huh?)

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Close your eyes and try and imagine the
sound of a gay man’s voice.Think you
have it?I’m guessing you can hear an
over-excitable, perhaps nasal, high-pitched voice with a lisp.Where did this voice come from and why does
it ‘sound gay’.Gay filmmaker David Thorpe is on a mission to find
out how he got the voice that he does and why it has such a stigma around it,
from both inside and outside of the gay community.

“The guide to
survival is you have to set yourself some rules”.And those rules apparently are to be as
outrageous, glamorous and fabulous as possible.

In nightclubs
across the East End of London throughout the last decade, a collection of
raucous drag performers where beginning to develop a fiercely loyal following
that would push them towards the mainstream.Dressed like a Girl is
narrated by the ‘ringleader’ Jonny Woo,
who poetically leads us through the rises and (minor) falls of the alternative
drag scene as they get more and more attention from the elite fashion, theatre
and clubbing communities.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Which is inherently scarier? An external
shock to the body – such as a parachute jump; or an internal shock to the body
– such as a virus.What about if you
combined the two?Vivant! is a tender look at 5 HIV+ men who spend a week camping
together at a converted airbase as they prepare for their first solo sky
dive.They must learn how to jump and
how to fall, and at the same time get to know each other and how each has
adapted to the illness.

Good documentaries are all about empathy
and insight and Vivant! offers a
purely observational viewpoint of 5 gay men who live with HIV talking about the
impact it has on their lives. Director Vincent Boujon and the
filmmakers do not interject and ask questions and there are no ‘talking heads’
interviews, the camera just collects their discussions as they sit round the
campsite and talk – sometimes for up to 10 minute sequences.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Shirin (Desiree Akhavan - also Writer/Director) is an outspoken
twenty-something Brooklynite trying to please her Persian parents, from whom
she is hiding her bisexuality, whilst trying to find meaningful employment
after a break-up from her domineering, but likeable, girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).The news of her brother’s betrothal to a
prize Iranian bride forces her to reflect on her own romantic decisions as she
begins to unsuccessfully date a collection of ill-matched men and women around
the city.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Futuro
Beach bursts into life
as two men, Heiko and Konrad, ride their motorbikes over beach sand dunes to
the orgasmic repetitive pump of Suicide’s
1977 classic Ghostrider (which has frankly never sounded so good…)
After running into the sea they quickly get dragged out of their depth and
Heiko (Fred Lima) is seen being
pulled underneath as Konrad (Clemens
Schick) is saved by a local lifeguard Donata (Wagner Moura).

After Donata has to break the news to
Konrad in the hospital, he gives him a lift home that ends up with them having
intense sex in Donata’s car leading to a relationship that takes them through
clubs, beaches and eventually back to Konrad’s native Berlin.The only problem is that Konrad is leaving
behind his partner and Donata is leaving behind his little brother Aryton,
which causes some conflict that eventually leads to them having trouble in
their new life in Europe…

Thursday, March 19, 2015

I
Am Michael jumps
chronologically around the ten years between Michael Glatze (James Franco) being a prominent gay
activist and queer magazine editor in San Francisco and Canada and him becoming
an evangelical, anti-homosexual Christian preacher in Wyoming.A kind of going-back-in-the-closet true story
that both delighted the Christian community and horrified the gay community
around 10 years ago.

At first Michael is shown picking-up
guys in nightclubs and taking ecstasy with his boyfriend Bennett (Zachary Qunito), before being somewhat
radicalized by news of the tragic death of Matthew
Shepard.They eventually move to Canada due to Bennett
getting a job, where they also meet Tyler (Charlie
Carver) – a young gay radical that joins them as they live as a
threesome.The lovers decide to go on a
road trip around the West Coast to lecture about LGBT rights and make a
documentary about young teenagers telling their stories, where increasingly
Michael complains about having heart palpitations and insists on getting advice
from lots of medical professionals.After finally getting the all-clear, he starts to attribute his recovery
to a higher power and makes moves to get in touch with different religions and
clear his head (and remove his homosexuality).

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

When Jay (Maika Monroe) decides to have sex with her strange-acting new
friend Hugh, he uses the opportunity to violently reveal that she has now been
cursed by a dangerous demon that will follow her until she can pass it on by
sleeping with someone else.She, her two
sisters Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and
Kelly (Lili Sepe) and long-term
friendly neighbor Paul, (Keir Gilchrist)
all initially think that this is a cruel abusive joke so try to confront Hugh
about it, yet Jay begins to be haunted by disturbing figures slowly approaching
her that others cannot see.This leads
to the friends all trying to figure out a way to ‘cure’ Jay of her curse, that
ultimately leads to tensions between the friendly men in her life who want to
help her…

The premise is so simple, and feeds into
such a pervasive fear among teenagers and young people (fear of sex / fear of
sexually transmitted diseases), that the difficult ‘horror’ work of the film is
instilled very early on without actually having to provide many twists or
scares.The very idea that casual sex
can be deadly goes against every urge in teenager’s minds and is therefore a
brilliantly uncomfortable theme to play out in such detail for 100 minutes…

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

This year, Crispy Sharp is going to be working a lot to promote
the Wotever DIY Film Festival
– a three-day festival that celebrates independent and lo-fi queer filmmaking
held primarily at the Cinema Museum in London.There will be a handful of feature films, a much larger amount of
shorts, discussions & debates and workshops – and lots of booze and
giggles.

The submission window is now open for this year’s event, with the
deadline being the 31st May.Below is a description in their own words about what they are looking
for:

“We are looking for short films up to 30 minutes
on a queer theme. However, we will prioritise films 15 minutes and under.
Feature length films will be considered although please be aware we have very
limited space for these. All films need to be DIY or independent films of any
genre on a queer theme. We have a particular interest in films about queer
people and queer culture reclaiming space. Other than that, our only criteria is
that they must be in keeping with our Wotever ethos and as such we will not
consider submissions that are racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic,
ableist, sizeist, feature religious intolerance or are in any way prejudiced or
exclusionary towards a particular group or identity. We are always trying to
improve accessibility at Wotever DIY Film Festival and with that we assert that
all filmmakers selected for the festival must work to commit to subtitling
their films.

We welcome films that push the boundaries of
queer thinking and ideology, are thought-provoking and progressive. Saying
that, we also appreciate a nice queer-meets-queer love story, slap stick comedy
or music video we can dance to."

All submissions must use the official submission form and be available
for download or streaming to be viewed by the programming team.For more information and to get access to the
form or to ask a question please contact Theresa & Tara at woteverfilm@gmail.com (so far I’ve met
half of them; they’re super lovely…)

There is more information on last year’s event at the links below as well as upcoming
news. I will also definitely have them as a guest on the Crispy Sharp Podcast in the coming weeks to explain more...